The Tooth Fairy, Santa, and the Monster Under the Bed: The Hyperreal Realm of Childhood

Our discussion of the hyperreal has thus far been focused either on advanced technologies or sophisticated techniques of “brainwashing” that induce an inability to distinguish the real world from an invented one in adults. However, it is important to realize that adolescents come to experience the hyperreal in everyday life in an brutally efficient manner that has yet to be discussed. From birth children are exposed to fairy tales and fables that depict magical worlds which are never distinguished to them as invented by their parents. Having no reason to doubt their caretakers, and being still in the process of developing their own logical faculties, children accept these stories as truth, and will often orient their understanding of the environment around these myths. There is a seamless accumulation of “real world” knowledge and “Tooth Fairy” knowledge that cannot and will not coexist in adulthood. For example, as a child I learned that winter was the season of both snow and Santa. Snow was a tangible reality, a meteorological phenomenon that I could go outside and hold in my hands, while Santa was a complete fabrication of events that my parents had fooled me and my brother into believing. Nevertheless, I could not distinguish any difference between the validity of the two until much later in life. While I don’t regret the excitement of knowing that a 300 pound man broke into my home just to give me and every other child in the world the exact gifts that we wanted, I do find it extremely implicating that ritually deceiving children, or those considered subordinate and dependent, is considered justified by parents at large, our authority figures. Can we be surprised then that in our society our authority figures in government and finance, who were once betrayed by these same stories, routinely find ways to exploit and deceive the ignorant population at large? Perhaps the monsters under the bed are not twelve legged creatures, but rather are the consequences of being educated in a society that tolerates the deceit of the inferior minded.